Hanover
Until this past year, she’d thought the prejudices that divide people along lines of race, class and religion were beginning to soften. “I guess I was living under the delusion that we really are becoming an integrated society,” she said. “Now, it’s almost as if we’re back to basics. We have to begin again with ‘this person’s a human being, that person’s a human being.’ It’s very disheartening, but now we know where we have work to do.”
The reading, which was followed by a question and answer session between Nye and the audience, was part of an author series sponsored by the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities called “Poetics of Politics — Politics of Poetics.”
As Nye sees it, dividing lines can take many different forms. For instance, in downtown San Antonio, Texas, where she lives, developers want to revamp the Alamo to attract more tourists, a plan that includes installing a glass wall around the original perimeter of the property, she said.
“It’s like putting up a glass wall anywhere,” she said. “It invites filth, dirt, damage. For one thing, they want to take away the ancient, beautiful trees, which is a crazy thing to do in Texas. You don’t take away the trees. But the more important question is, why are we getting developers to dream up what needs to happen to the centerpiece of such a wonderful old city?”
The barrier around the Alamo echoes the barriers Nye has consistently sought to overcome through the power of language.
“This is why activism is so important on a local level,” she said, adding that for her, “poetry isn’t trying to make a lot of money, or run for office, or do anything insidious. It’s just trying to tell truths in an authentic voice.”
Nye, who has written or edited more than 30 volumes of poetry and prose and whose accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes, delivered her talk on Wednesday just hours after submitting her latest book, Voices in the Air, to her editor. The volume is partly inspired by Nye’s ongoing efforts to elevate the experiences of those who are most familiar with life’s barriers, among them middle schoolers in the Gaza Strip and prison inmates, as well as by her own gut response to current events.
“In some ways it very much connects to this time, but it’s also about voices that we hear echoing from all times and places, if we listen,” she said. “If you’re dissatisfied with the voices we hear representing reality today, then what larger voice, what inspired and inspiring voices, can we turn to for guidance?”
This attunement to suffering, girded by a spirit of optimism, is the impetus behind much of Nye’s recent work.
So is Nye’s awareness of “dividing lines,” which have long been a personal subject as well as a political interest. The daughter of a Palestinian refugee father and an American mother of German and Swiss descent, Nye grew up in Ferguson, Mo., the same suburb of St. Louis where racial tensions played out on a national stage in 2014 after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was fatally shot by a white police officer. When Nye, now 65, was a child there, the public schools were still segregated, and she and her family members were the only Arabs she knew.
“I feel lucky in some ways, because I feel I always sort of skirted the edges of prejudice addressed to (our family) personally,” she said, attributing this in part to her father’s gregarious personality and spirited engagement in the Ferguson community. “But as a child, I was so curious about why some people were accepted into my school, and others weren’t, and it seemed to accord to this invisible dividing line I could never understand, and was full of questions about.”
This relentless curiosity is what gives Nye’s poetry its “quiet power and domestic mystery,” said Ivy Schweitzer, a Dartmouth professor of English and women’s studies who introduced Nye on Wednesday. “Her … voice requires us as readers to dwell in the innocence of a child, balanced on the slim cusp of greater and often sadder knowledge.”
Nye’s family moved to Jerusalem when she was 14 to live with her grandmother, a life event that Nye said was crucial to her development as an artist, further exposing her to the insidiousness of prejudice, she said.
“I went from living in St. Louis, a place with such a strong black-white divide where we were the only Arabs, to Jerusalem’s Palestinian-Israeli divide,” she said. “That gets inside you.”
She has written prolifically about the suffering she has witnessed, including her grandmother getting tear-gassed in the streets. “I’m not trying to convince anybody when I do that. I’m just trying to describe the lives I know and have seen,” she said. In her poem Blood, she writes:
… my father told me who he was,
“Shihab”— “shooting star”—
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.
A year after moving to Jerusalem, just prior to the Six Day War, Nye’s family relocated to San Antonio. There, “in a predominantly Latino city, my family found itself in a place with a great respect for multiculturalism,” she said. She has lived there ever since, though she still travels widely to lead workshops.
It’s this “wandering” lifestyle, as she put it, that has grounded her work in the prosaic beauty of everyday life.
“I’m fascinated by the ordinary,” she said. “I’m very attached to the dignity of peoples’ daily lives, how they endure and how they live.”
Nye’s ride up to Hanover, for example, gave her pause.
“Looking out at the trees and the deer running around in them because it was twilight, and seeing the sky … gave me a precious feeling of the land and the trees doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” she said. “And so that is something haunting to me in thinking about nature these days. Because it’s still doing its best at what it does, and what are we doing?”
Such are the ways in which Nye continually links the physical world to the mystery of the human spirit.
“I keep hearing people say how these are such strange days,” she said. “But hopefully, there’s some good strange that emerges as well.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.